Women Who Rock You™ — Songs From Janis to Alanis & More
On a recent Monday night, when Broadway's marquees dim and much of the theater district takes a well-earned breath, a different kind of expectation filled City Winery New York. The room buzzed with anticipation. Patrons settled into their seats, conversations softened, and eyes turned toward the stage. Everyone seemed to be waiting for the same moment.
Then Mary Bridget Davies appeared beneath the lights. She planted her feet with soft confidence and instantly commanded the room. Before she sang a single note, it was clear this would be more than a concert. It would be an encounter with an artist whose voice, presence, and storytelling can transform a crowded room into an intimate, electric, unforgettable space.
A Song as a Moral Obligation
Allow me to be plain about it, as the old believers were plain: this was not a tribute act content to trace someone else’s outline. Davies — the Tony-nominated force who lived inside Janis Joplin’s skin in A Night With Janis Joplin — does not imitate. She inhabits. From the first phrase, she sang as though the songs were bills she had come to pay. The crowd, glasses of estate wine sweating in their hands, immediately understood they were in the presence of someone who treats a song as a moral obligation rather than a decoration.
Mary Bridget Davies in Women Who Rock You at The Loft at City Winery, NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus
The Setlist Spanning Janis to Alanis & More
Consider, first, the sheer span of it — and the way that span built, song by song, into a single argument about the women who fought their way into a rock world that preferred its guitars in male hands. She opened with Melissa Etheridge’s aching “Come to My Window,” a confession offered as an overture, then squared her shoulders for the granite triumph of Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best.” From there, she turned to Stevie Nicks, giving us “Landslide” and “Edge of Seventeen” in close succession. Davies did something subtle and brave: rather than chase Nicks’s smoky mysticism, she met it with her own grit. “Landslide” landed not as nostalgia but as a question asked freshly, tonight, of everyone old enough to have changed.
Then the genius of the curation revealed itself in its detours. A sly, swaggering “Stuck in the Middle with You” — that 1970s gem from Stealers Wheel — arrived as a wink, a signal that joy belongs in rock as surely as catharsis. Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” loosened every shoulder in the house. Then the mood banked toward the songwriter the night had come to honor: “Don’t Compromise Yourself” gave way to a slow-burning “Get It While You Can,” which Davies recast as a rock ballad. It proved, alongside the hard-charging numbers, that she can carry a song at any temperature and keep it from falling apart. Throughout, between songs, she told stories — funny, tender, occasionally wicked — about these women and their lives, revealing the evening’s quiet thesis: that we all know the songs, but rarely the survival they contain.
From there, the set continued to expand its reach. Patti Smith’s “Because the Night” arrived as a holy collision of poetry and pulse, until the room felt less like a winery than a chapel that had learned to sweat. Then Davies pulled everything down to a hush for Jerry Ragovoy's “Stay With Me” (originally recorded by Lorraine Ellison), reimagined as a slow, bluesy ballad that let the band breathe, and her voice ache. “What More Do You Want” followed, and then a nod to a newer generation in an Alanis Morissette “Uninvited/You Oughta Know" medley before the night bent toward its final reckoning. Across ballads, hard rock, and blues, Davies made each idiom sound native to her. That was the surest sign of a singer who has lived inside all of them.
The Mary Bridget Davies Band — Lead & rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards & organ, drums, and percussion with Mary Bridget Davies in Women Who Rock You at The Loft at City Winery, NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus
Honoring Jerry Ragovoy: One Song That Waited
And then there was the thread that ran through the entire night. The true emotional center of the evening belonged to the songwriter being honored: Jerry Ragovoy, the author of “Piece of My Heart,” “Cry Baby,” and “Get It While You Can,” whose 2026 induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame was celebrated that evening. Ragovoy wrote with a craftsman’s restraint and a believer’s ache. His songs surfaced across the set like a recurring vow — the rock-ballad “Get It While You Can” earlier in the night, and, near the very end, a “Piece of My Heart” that Davies did not simply sing but repatriated, returning it to the bloodstream of the woman who first made it famous.
The most haunting of them, though, was “Don’t Compromise Yourself,” a Ragovoy composition written for Joplin before her death, a song she never lived to record. To hear Davies finally give it breath was to witness a circuit, broken for half a century, quietly close. With any true moment of being, time does not march so much as dilate. The present opens a door onto the past, and for three minutes the two stood in the same room. Davies has said the song’s message is simple and merciless — that, in the end, you are all you have — and her reading made the philosophy seem less like a lyric and more like a hand on the shoulder.
Janis Joplin. Cash Box (1968) Public Domain via Wikipedia Commons
Interpretation is Itself an Act of Creation
What struck me, sitting there, was how completely the performance dissolved the distance between songwriter and singer, between then and now. Ragovoy built his songs the way a master builds a staircase — every step load bearing, nothing ornamental — and Davies climbs them without ever looking down. There is a lesson in that humility. In an era that prizes the new for its own sake, she insists that interpretation is itself an act of creation. To sing an old song truly is not to embalm it but to wake it. Indeed, the whole evening argued, gently but firmly, that a great song belongs to whoever is brave enough to mean every word of it.
Keeping Guitar-Driven American Rock Alive
Here, the critic in me wants to widen the lens, because what Davies is doing belongs to a larger, increasingly endangered tradition. American rock and roll was forged out of grit and imagination, and the commanding bark of a lead guitar — the lineage the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame exists to protect — has grown rare on live stages. Therefore, it matters that her band keeps the guitars loud and the groove human, refusing the airless perfection of the click track. The blues run underneath everything she sings. You can hear it the way you hear bedrock under a river.
Eric Clapton playing The_Fool with Cream (1968). Hit Parader Magazine Public Domain via Wikipedia Commons
In that sense, Davies stands alongside today’s revivalists — Greta Van Fleet, Dirty Honey, Rival Sons, and Mammoth WVH — who insist, against the algorithm, that a real amplifier in a real room still has something to say. She is, in effect, carrying the torch from a slightly different angle. Where they revive the riff, she revives the singer who once stood in front of it. She gestures, too, toward kindred spirits like Chrissie Hynde, whose toughness is the connective tissue of this whole story.
The Encore — and the Verdict
For the encore, she reached past rock entirely and offered Linda Perry’s 1992 song “What’s Up,” and the choice was perfect — a benediction with excitement rather than a fireworks finale, a song that asks rather than asserts. It sent everyone out into the West Side night a little quieter and a little more awake. As a verdict, then, permit me to borrow the consumer-guide brevity of the trade: this is an A. Go when Davies is in town.
Because finally, that is the gift of Women Who Rock You™, the developing concert-and-media franchise from Don’t Compromise Productions. It reminds us that these songs were never merely entertainment; they were, as Davies puts it, survival guides. On an ordinary Monday, in a warm room above the river, an extraordinary singer handed them back to us, still warm, still true, still — gloriously — alive.
If this review accomplishes one thing, let it be this: do not wait. Mary Bridget Davies sings like the lyric is aimed at you alone, and such intimate rooms do not stay secret for long. Follow her next moves, then book a table at City Winery New York, where every season delivers Broadway-caliber voices, handcrafted wine, and the rare thrill of guitar-driven rock played for real. Discover the music. Then go feel it live.
Women Who Rock You™ — Songs From Janis to Alanis & More
Starring Tony Award nominee Mary Bridget Davies
City Winery New York
25 11th Avenue (Pier 57), New York, NY 10011
(646) 751-6033 · citywinery.com/new-york-city
Tickets — Current & Upcoming Seasons
tickets.citywinery.com · Women Who Rock You tickets & tour info
Artists, Roles & Instruments- Mary Bridget Davies — Lead vocals, the evening’s star and interpreter
- Jerry Ragovoy — Composer & songwriter; posthumously honored 2026 Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee
- The Mary Bridget Davies Band — Lead & rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards & organ, drums, and percussion
https://youtu.be/7Iwd-5ooyE4?si=2aRyLZDeNa8lL8XU
